Straight No Chaser

Lovely

mele kalikimaka, since no one asked, means "merry christmas." i refuse to believe all indeterminate-number of you are hawaiian-literate. i refuse.

there was an early argument about loveliness. he'd written this poem, i've probably talked about it before because it's the one of his that bears the most significance, for us, the one inspired by dave matthews and also by leonard nimoy's shekinha project. woman worship. he was like, this is my gift to universal womanhood, and i pointed out that, no, he'd used the word lovely, meaning it was really only a gift to women who happened to be lovely. blah blah blah every woman is lovely, every woman's smile evokes prancing unicorns, not true, some women aren't lovely, i don't think of myself as especially lovely. (a mistake, that last add-in, but it was true at the time.)

i was wrong. i am lovely. i mean, not in general so much, but most of the time when he's kissing or touching me, and always when we're on the phone. we'll be talking and i'll start to feel like a glowworm, glowing bright neon green, afraid i'm going to burn a happy shannon-shaped hole through the center of my bed. it's not a function of cuteness or prettiness, which is a relief; that was my initial mistake, thinking it was. i've got my opinions on how i look, and they don't always perfectly match the way people react to me. it's something else entirely, something in the way i shape my words, according to marcus, and the way my thoughts line up, as pegs on a lite-brite, colorful and luminescent as individual pieces but more valuable as parts of an entire picture.

don't be mad, don't suck your teeth. that's me making fun of myself, sort of. but you get the idea.

anyway, my basic problem with the idea of sex and sexuality, and the reason it took me such a long time to acknowledge them as part of my own life, is that they do not make any sense, in the context of anything else. we are sexually attracted to one another because ________________, and there is no greater concept to fill in that blank. we are because we are, because we're designed to; that's it. there is no philosophical anything that can be rightly applied to make it make sense.

i mean, that's as far as i could take that thought, till recently. when i miss marcus, i listen to a lot of dave. stand up hasn't made an especially great impression on me, except track fourteen, "hunger for the great light of love," which invites all these strange revelations--bear with me here. because, i don't know. it's something he says, it's a dirty and basically demeaning song, but the beginning of the refrain, i want to feed your hunger, sort of helps me with this problem i have, trying to integrate the idea of sex into the rest of my life, which otherwise more or less makes sense. i guess i want to be filled, physically and otherwise; i have moments of wanting to consume him, wihch i know is inappropriate, and then subsequent moments of remembering that there's a more reasonable way to appease that want. the pregnancy thing is linked to that, of course. i mean, it still doesn't really make sense.

just, i mean, i try. to make sense of things. in another classic example of my dramatically overthinking everything, my mind is already in tonight's potential phone conversation, on what might happen if i call and leave him a message (he's still at work, right now) and say "just wanted to say hey, you don't have to call me back, talk to you tomorrow, love ya." probably he'll think he's being tested, and deliberately not call me for that reason, and then i, silently recognizing this, will be hurt that he didn't call, even though he will have followed my wishes exactly. it's ridiculousness, to try to keep ahead of myself the way i do. and it doesn't work. but it doesn't matter. i'll call and leave the message; whatever happens, happens.

i should have saved this for the next entry. mmmmm. but not so much. i am lying to myself, trying to convince myself i don't know what inspired me, this time. but i mean, obviously it was aaron, who is not feeling very lovely at the moment. and that, friends and neighbors, is a crime against intuition, because he of all people should know. how lovely he is.

which, like sex, has nothing to do with anything. but i thought i should mention it.